Miniature painting, modelling, converting and procrastinating

Slowly slowly moving things along the cycle from pile of bits, to grey plastic figure, to black plastic figure to painted plastic figure.

These are the unpainted little runts I posted a while ago. I think they’ve been tweaked a little along the way – one got a mohawk for instance because that’s pretty quintessential for 40k. I actually like the look of ghoul heads with a haircut, I think it works pretty well.

On to the pictures. Four new figures and a group shot with their painted friend from before.

It’s been far too long since I posted anything but over the past few months I’ve actually been very productive. Here’s the first project that I’ve completed this year which is a set of necromunda cooling towers and associated shacks clinging to them.

I was inspired for these by some really cool terrain on the ammobunker Inq28 forums by Starfarer and Shibboleth – their names are links to their respective threads.

I really liked the shanty town style that they were doing and wanted to put my own spin on it so I built these vertical forms.

The pictures below show them before they were first primed.

In the main they were made from thick cardboard roughly cut up and stuck together with very thin superglue. I’m not much of a measurer when it comes to this sort of thing I tend to cut rough shapes and then trim to size.

Once the cardboard shell of each building was in place they were detailed with balsawood, more cardboard and plastic bits and plasticard. The most useful parts were corrugated cardboard bought from an art store which made for the roofing and model railway siding which provides the other type of ridged surface. Finally I had some diamond tread plating which is another type of extruded styrene sheet and is a mainstay of any sort of 40k terrain.

The details like windows and the vents came from a terrain set from Maelstrom’s Edge which was a Kickstarter that I backed. Nice pieces of chunky detail.

Finally the gantries were made from an Imex Platformer set from Pegasus Hobbies which is now unfortunately as rare as hens teeth to find. The silos are bottles with the screw cap sawed off and a little detail added with plasticard.

I’ve had an ogryn conversion in progress for what seems like months and spent some time today getting him finished off to a state I’m happy to undercoat him. So this is the last change for a WIP shot before then. Also the close up shots are showing me a lot of things I really should smooth out and tidy up before he gets sprayed.

He’s converted from a standard ogryn, with the ripper gun cut down into a pistol which was made from plasticard tubing. If I’d had an auto-cannon drum to use life would have been a lot simpler I think.

The backpack took me a lot of tries to get to something I’m happy with. This is it’s third incarnation. The fan in the centre is from zinge industries. The rest was built up around it with plasticard, and parts from a mechanicus backpack and an ork snazzgun.

Finally I felt this little guy was the perfect accomplice for him. He’s the simplest of conversions – a MaxMini gasmask head trimmed down a little on a gretchen body.

I’ve had these conversions knocking around on my workbench for a while and spent a bit of time trying to get them finished off and ready to be primed.

The first guy is made from a plague monk and the left over head and arm from the Dark Vengeance cultist from the previous post. The right arm is from an Ungor (I think?) holding a plague monk sword in reverse. I’m amazed looking at him at just how much greenstuff he has on him.

His colleague is a similar conversion but with flagellant arms and weapon swaps. The chainsword is from Victoria Miniatures as is part of the backpack. I also greenstuffed him some hair as the “bald ghoul head” look has been done a lot before.

I spent some time this weekend working on finishing up more conversions of the cultists. I’ve had these on my desk for a while and both were pretty close, just needing a little tidying up.

First off, a heavy flamer conversion using Cadian arms and the flames from a flagellant head. When I paint this guy up I’ll have a go at OSL as there’s a big obvious light source up there on top!

Next up is another cultist converted into a duellist pose. This guy was a happy accident, he was originally going to be holding a heavy weapon but didn’t quite work out. He uses the sword left over from the cultist champion and a scion pistol, as well as a head swap from the admech style cultist.